Mabou Mines Film Series Will Showcase the Company's Forays Into Film

The avant-garde downtown theater troupe Mabou Mines, founded in 1970 by JoAnne Akalaitis, Lee Breuer, Philip Glass, Ruth Maleczech, and David Warrilow, has announced Mabou Mines Cinema, a series exploring the company’s little-seen forays into film. Mabou Mines Cinema will feature six different programs running March 13-19 at Anthology Film Archives.

In the first program is the new wave-inspired, Lee Breuer-directed Moi-Même, featuring a brief cameo by Jean-Luc Godard. Mabou Mines shot the film in Paris in 1968 before officially forming the company and the 16mm raw footage was abandoned without sound or script until it was resurrected and reimagined by Breuer’s son Mojo Lorwin in 2024. The film stars Kevin Mathewson as a 13-year-old wannabe auteur alongside David Warrilow, Ruth Maleczech, and Fred Neumann, and the screening on March 13 will be followed by a Q&A with Lorwin and Mathewson.

Other films in the series include JoAnne Akalaitis’s feature film version of her Obie-winning play Dead End Kids (1986), which has a soundtrack by David Byrne, who makes a cameo, and Philip Glass and Jill Godmilow’s six-hour, fly-on-the-wall documentary Lear ‘87 Archive (2001), which has never been screened theatrically and follows the rehearsal process for the company’s gender-reversed version of Shakespeare’s King Lear, directed by Breuer and starring Maleczech.

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